Robert Powell

The remarkable story of a language that began as a minor Germanic dialect, to its position as a global language. This is also the story of the people who shaped the language.

Colin Whisterfield spends his days using a radio telescope to look for his lost sister. At the same time, and in another time, the Watcher dances to keep the sky above the earth and the stars flying. Colin will have to remember what happened when he was twelve, if he wants to find his sister. And the Watcher will have to find the Woman. Otherwise the skies will fall…  Book 3 of series.

The events that cause Inspector Faro to reopen the case of 'The Gruesome Convent Murders' lead him into a labyrinth of passions, betrayal and greed concealed behind the respectable middle class exteriors of Edinburgh society.

Richard Fawkes tells the fascinating story of over a thousand years of Western classical music and it's composers. From Gregorian chant to Stravinsky and Henryk Gorecki - the first living classical composer to get into the pop album charts - performances from some of the most highly praised recordings of recent years illustrate the narrative.

Since its origins in the sixteenth century, opera has been an extravagant, costly affair, arousing great passions. It has also produced some of the most sublime works of art, from Monteverdi to Wagner. Here Richard Fawkes traces the history of opera up to the present day, featuring more than seventy-five musical examples.

An introspective young boy, Joseph Coppock squints at the world with his lazy eye. Living alone in an old house, he reads comics, collects birds' eggs and plays with his marbles. When, one day, a rag-and-bone man called Treacle Walker appears, exchanging an empty jar of a cure-all medicine and a donkey stone for a pair of Joseph's pyjamas and a lamb's shoulder blade, a mysterious friendship develops between them.

A fusion of myth, magic and the stories we make for ourselves, Treacle Walker is an extraordinary novel from one of our greatest living writers.

Alan Garner remembers his early childhood in the Cheshire village of Alderley Edge: life at the village school as 'a sissy and a mardy-arse'; his father joining the army to guard the family against Hitler; the coming of the Yanks, with their comics and sweets and chewing gum. From one of our greatest living writers, it is a remarkable and evocative memoir of a vanished England.

St Petersburg 1917, a city on the brink of revolution, and Sandro Ruzsky of the city police is investigating the murders of a young couple found out on the ice on the river Neva. What is the involvement of Maria, the ballerina Ruzsky once loved, and is she the next victim?